Animals riding transit have become a global phenomenon. What??
The grey pigeon stays close to the centre pole, like any other subway traveler. The train reaches Runnymede station, and on cue, she struts toward the doors, stepping through just before they close.
The video of the subway-riding pigeon, taken in February by Elaine Georgolios, has recently become more than a YouTube sensation. Sent to Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology, it has been shared and discussed by pigeon researchers.
The bird doesn't seem lost or disoriented. It looks like it's just trying get where it's going, like everyone else.
“Nothing surprises me,” says Charles Walcott, professor emeritus of neurobiology and behaviour at Cornell University. Walcott, who has spent much of his career studying how pigeons are able to find their way home across long distances, says the birds are smarter than we give them credit for. He sees no reason why they couldn't find their way around a subway.
“It may have been a fluke the first time (it rode the subway), and then the pigeon said, ‘Well, that's a neat way to get around,'” says Walcott.
At Cornell, where researchers at a program called Project PigeonWatch study the birds, an assistant hypothesized that Henry could simply have been going where he saw more light when the subway door opened at Runnymede. Pigeons are attracted to light.
Walcott doesn't entirely agree, however.
“Then why did it get into the car in the first place?” he laughs. “You gotta ask the pigeon.”
Pigeons aren't the only non-human species riding transit.
Some stray dogs in Moscow have been using the subways for years. They navigate a complex maze of subway lines and get on and off at regular stops in a bid to find food.
Only a small fraction of Moscow's approximately 35,000 stray dogs have adapted to riding the subway, but those that do zip on and off quickly. They stretch out beside passengers on rows of seats, or lie down beside peoples' feet.
The subway isn't always a safe place for the strays. One dog, Malchik, was stabbed by an unfriendly passenger. A statue of him was erected in Mendeleyevskaya station.
Other urban animals are also finding ingenious ways to adapt and thrive in sprawling, hard-to-navigate man-made environments.
For some reason, cats seem to prefer the bus. There is the white cat nicknamed Macavity, after a T.S. Eliot poem, who rides a bus in England's West Midlands, getting off at a row of shops down the road.
Another British cat, Casper, rode a Plymouth bus every day for four years, sleeping for the entire round trip before the driver let him off at his stop. He was killed in a hit-and-run, and a book about his adventures is reportedly in the works.
A few months ago, Toronto saw its first bus-riding dog when a puppy boarded a Scarborough bus without its owner. That was a one-time trip, which ended when animal services brought it back to its master.
Witnesses have reported Toronto's pigeon, now called Henry, returning to the station every so often. The birds have appeared at other stations as well, not bothering anyone, just sitting on the platforms.
Maybe they know what they're doing. Walcott says the birds have surprised researchers with their abilities before. In some experiments at Harvard, pigeons were placed in front of a slide show and trained to peck a key when they saw one with a human being on it. They were rewarded with corn when they picked the human, and punished with the lights being turned off if they picked the wrong slide. The birds were able to choose a slide with a boy partially hidden under a bush — one researchers hadn't noticed had a human on it.
“What it tells you is that these pigeons are extraordinarily good in their visual discrimination,” says Walcott. “Pigeons have been regarded as flying rats, and the thing they share with rats is an extraordinary flexibility. They're a lot brighter than we give them credit for.”
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//www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlrnV_Tr7tk&feature=player_embedded Now this is funny, it's like he knew just where to get off!
